Fine, America, I’ll tell you my secret: although I have betrayed history and abandoned homeland to live with you for over two decades now, I can still sing all the words to the Philippine national anthem by heart. Bayang magiliw, Perlas ng Silanganan Alab ng puso, sa dibdib mo’y buhay. Yes, the melody still returns me to the simple happiness of my childhood, to my old Antipolo neighborhood where during summer the children played our patintero street games well into the darkened sky, while loving neighbors kept watch under thousands of stars and the moon, cheering and laughing loudly along the bougainvillea-lined terraces.
But calm down, please. America, I choose you. Yes you’re right I still can’t sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in its entirety but cut me some slack — how can I learn something that only divas with Whitney Houston’s vocal range can sing? Even the lowest key would be too high, plus I was an asthmatic kid anyway so I never did have strong lungs to begin with. And besides, America, voice lessons just got to be too expensive. Why must you be so demanding?
At least I haven’t given up yet on struggling to learn Vladimir Horowitz’s transcription of “Stars and Stripes Forever” on the piano. Yes, I know it’s taking me long enough, but the piccolo part is a killer! And have you seen Horowitz’s huge gorilla hands? Of all the things that had to be small in my big round body it had to be my puny palms! Oh, it sucks, how it sucks, America, that I wasn’t born with more talent, more skill, more God-given natural abilities to please and honor you by realizing the big dreams we have been dreaming together.
And even if I know you’re thinking it, please don’t say that I’ll never be a true American. Say you’ll love me and take care of me like a parent would of any child, even if I’m only adopted, even if you won’t amend your Constitution and let me at least have a crack at becoming president one day. Can’t you see, America, I’m really trying here! I’m doing the best that I can to live honestly and make a better living, even if I’ll never make it to Hollywood or be on TV. Even if you play favorites. I’ll still keep trying. And I’ll still be waiting, America, I’ll be waiting for you to choose me.
Abigail Licad immigrated from the Philippines with her family at age 13. She was naturalized as an American citizen in 2000. She is still struggling to understand the full import of her naturalization oath to “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty,” and to question how this affects her relationship to her historical past and beloved childhood home.
Cough into your elbow. Shelter your skin to your skin against the words you breathe in. Chinese Virus. Yes, I know it hurts. The swollen blaze of marrow. Your lungs sliced apart like filleted fish. Breath scraping up tender tissue—desperate to stay in your body. Keep exhaling into the inside of your elbow. Your skin there is soft enough, the crease deep enough. The warm steam of your breath will return to your lungs.
The six feet between you and them has always been there.
Keep your mask on. The one with soft cotton on the inside and a dinosaur print on the outside. Who can be afraid of a child wearing an orange brontosaurus? (They will be afraid). They will put forefingers to the corners of their eyes and stretch a slant to their eyelids. They will spit at you—spittle slick with fear. Chant yellow, yellow, yellow. Stab you, burn you with acid. Break your home into spirals of shattered glass. The virus is not the one we think we know.
Wash your hands. Not because you are dirty. You are not. You are not dog eater, chink, dangerous, diseased. You are not. You are the child who runs so fast your body shakes like a wind-whipped wave and nothing can catch you.
Bring my love nearer than breath, deeper than skin, close as your heart. And even then—my love will not protect you in the ways you or I think it will. We are all guessing— at the distance that will keep us safe.
Diana Ma is a Chinese American poet and author of young adult books. Her poetry has been published in Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women and The Asian Pacific American Journal. She has an MA in English with a Creative Writing focus from the University of Illinois, Chicago and a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington. She lives in a suburb of Seattle and teaches English and Humanities at North Seattle College.
I am at the County Recorder’s office in Martinez, California filling out a request for a death certificate for my father, who died seven years ago. It is part of a quest to document his life to help me in a journey to open up my own immigration options. I take one form to request the certificate and realize that very possibly, I may need two. If they are able to look up deaths via location and approximate date and their files go back far enough, I may be able to locate information on my grandfather’s death, as well. I hand the clerk the completed request for my father’s certificate and one with information for my grandfather. Date of death states winter 1958. The clerk seems to have located a record as she charges me for two certificates and within minutes she is printing details of both my father’s and grandfather’s deaths on embossed paper. My father’s death is not a mystery. It’s a sad story for another day. My grandfather’s death has always been a tragic tale, one I was about to verify by reading the cause of death. My father had told us my grandfather Martín had been run over by a train in Crockett, near the houses on the water where most of the local brick workers and longshoremen lived. Abuelito Martín had been trying to pull up a friend who had passed out drunk on the train tracks when the train caught them both. Maybe they were both inebriated and Abuelito’s reflexes weren’t quick enough, or maybe he died a hero. In any case, my father was there and he witnessed it. He would later tell us, “I had to pick up pieces of my father before the firemen came. You can’t imagine it. Trozos de mi padre. A mí me tocó recogerlo.” Whenever my father was rueful or locked in his bedroom detached from us in mood and spirit, I chalked it up to the tragedy of losing his father in this brutal manner and how he was left to fend for himself in a country he never truly claimed as his own. Before I read my abuelito’s death certificate a panicking question arises, “What if the train really didn’t run him over? What if Dad made up that story?” Who would make up such a story, chain themselves to such a tragedy? I didn’t know, but my father held so many mysteries and he did have a penchant for storytelling. I quickly scan the document.
Place of death: Crockett (Rural) ½ mile East on San Pablo Railroad Cause of death: Crushing injuries of chest and multiple fractures.
I am standing in a county office less than six coastal miles along the Carquinez Straits from the very spot where his life ended. If I weren’t in a hurry and on my lunch break, I could walk there. There is also a train station half a block away. Two more bits of information strike me.
Length of stay in California: 30 years Name of Father and Maiden Name of Mother: (the names I choose not to disclose)
My father’s grandparents’ names are printed there. They are names I never knew, names that were never spoken of as my father would only speak of his mother’s side of the family, the descendants of hacendados, landowners, the blue-eyed folk with Spanish lineage. My Abuelito was 48 when he died, which meant if he’d been in California for 30 years he came into this country or at least left a legal trail at the age of 18. My great aunties had told me he was known as a norteño when he courted my grandmother, Isela. I have always considered myself a first generation Mexican-American since both my parents were born in Mexico, but if Abuelito had put down roots here this long ago, does that make me second generation or a generation and a half? Also remarkable is his address: #8 Railroad Avenue, Crockett. My mother tells me this was a ramshackle house built on stilts over the Carquinez Straits, where modest houses once existed for laborers. She moved into that house when she arrived in this country and shortly after those houses were condemned for their poor construction and dangerous proximity to the railroad. My own childhood house on Loring Avenue was on the very edge of a cliff overlooking the railroad below. It occurred to me that we had been in the same spot for three generations. No wonder I was getting restless to move somewhere else, to be riding trains and not crushed or haunted by them.
****
I am amassing a two-inch high stack of documents from three countries: the United States, Mexico and France. Each of the U.S. and Mexican documents require an official translation. Some of them require trips to Sacramento and an apostille from the California Secretary of State. My father’s death certificate takes its place in the pile of documents. In the age of Dreamers, some of whom I teach and organize workshops for, I realize I am embarrassingly over-documented, but I am also one generation away from campesina, one generation away from soul-sucking poverty. All I have to do is talk to my mother for 20 minutes and references to her impoverished childhood surface. My husband and children are French nationals and so it seems logical I should be as well, but I have put off the process for many years. I prided myself in being Californian, American with roots in Mexico, Xicana to the core. On some level, to file for some European citizenship stinks of betrayal. I tell my husband the reason he was able to become a U.S. citizen was thanks to my father’s struggles in this country and the abuelo who died on the railroad tracks. The price my father paid for living in California was the immigration itself, the tragedy of his father’s death, a lifelong alcohol addiction and 45 years of hard labor at a brickmaking factory. It was not a pretty life. Maybe now I wanted a pretty life. When people I meet, white people mostly, learn a little about my past they have trouble taking it in, understanding my trajectory. My parents had less than a sixth-grade education and never quite acquired English literacy skills. My mother made ends meet by working in restaurants and plant nurseries, sometimes taking care of elderly people in the neighborhood, supplementing my father’s income as a machinist. I am the youngest of six children and was the first to attend university. I hold degrees from UC Berkeley, UC Davis and a teaching credential from San Francisco State. Right after graduating from UC Berkeley, I worked for a prestigious archival music company, handling Spanish language marketing and promotion for Arhoolie Records (now owned by Smithsonian-Folkways). It felt like a successful path. After a solid five-year stint at Arhoolie I decided to become a high school teacher and I have worked in public education ever since. The independence and creativity of teaching fuels me, allows me to provide for my children but also competes for time dedicated to creative writing, my truest love. By some measure people see a success when they see me, but it’s a success that I’m ill at ease with. I have academic achievements and a stable, secure life, but what does any of that mean when I inhabit a country that cages and demonizes brown immigrant families, a country that brutalizes and hunts my Black brothers and sisters? As a young person I was always taught to reach for opportunity, that any goal was within my reach, but in this current environment of hostility to immigrants and people of color, my achievements feel hollow. My political actions are my writing, my community building, and nurturing conscious kids and educating youth in Northern California. It doesn’t feel like this is enough to create change with a government that so overtly violates brown and black bodies. How do I reconcile raising children in this place, in this time of violent transgressions? Northern California is my home. All I have to do is think of Abuelito Martín who died on those train tracks. All I have to do is hear the trains when I go to Richmond, Crockett or Berkeley and I have confirmation of the price my family paid to be here, but I can’t help but wonder is it still worth it to be here? In 2018, I traveled to the Southwest as invitations to visit other states unfurled before me. I visited Tucson, Santa Fe, and San Antonio in that order. My work as a writer and educator helped to carve this path. In 2017 I published a chapbook, Café Colima, as part of a first-place award in fiction through Kore Press, selected by one of my all-time writer heros, Edwidge Danticat. The good people at Kore Press organized a celebratory reading for me and my poet sister Natalia Treviño in Tucson. I traveled there to meet the publishers, read at their institute and visit the city. I was keenly aware of how close I was to the border and how close I was to Yuma, Arizona, the site of my father’s original border crossing. Even though my abuelo was already in California, my father at 14 was directed by my abuela Isela to go in search of his own father and to bring him back. “Te lo traes cuando lo encuentras.” Bring him back, she said, as if retrieving your father in another country was as easy as buying cinnamon from the corner store. This was 1946, a time before coyotes, before mass incarceration, but still my father was caught in Yuma and jailed for a time. I only know this because his sister told me when I was in my twenties, always trying to explain my father’s suffering. When he died, I found his journal next to a typewriter and one of the entries was about this very incident. He regained consciousness in a jail cell just to witness an elderly man being beat on the head with a broomstick by the jail keeper. He doesn’t tell how or why he was released but he does eventually make his way to California, jumping trains and finding work along the way. I know it is an experience that traumatized him. Not being able to “bring his father back” to Jalisco also traumatized him, especially as he found himself 10 years later witnessing my abuelo’s death, and then responsible for explaining this tragedy to the rest of the family back in Mexico. I know it was something he wanted to write about more. It is a story I will never completely know but will continue to explore with my fiction. I know Arizona as a state that anchors my father’s pain, yet I am grateful to Kore Institute for hosting me. This visit coincided with the time of inhumane family separations at border facilities, which continue to this day. My activism, whether it’s through writing, participating in protests, or raising funds for the ACLU, seems like a drop in the bucket against the monolithic machine that is ICE. In April 2018 I was invited to participate in a workshop hosted by Courageous Conversations for Latinx educators from across the country in Santa Fe. I attended with three of my teacher colleagues. We worked through three days of empowering panels on colorism, helping children of color succeed and honing our own stories to step into leadership. I was most stimulated by meeting other Latinx professionals from around the country, non-Californians who have a different heritage–Ecuatorianos, Hondureños, Guatemaltecos, Dominicanos, Puertorriqueños and Peruanos. It opened my eyes and inspired me to bond and share stories, to encourage each other to sustain our work as educators. Now in 2020, mid-pandemic, I wonder and pray for my Latinx colleagues and all teachers, truly, as we navigate the daily beast of distance learning. I wonder who of my peers across the nation has been endangered or will be endangered by a premature return to the classroom. I know this country has failed us in handling the pandemic, and there has been a disproportionate impact on communities of color. In July 2018 I had the privilege of attending the Macondo workshop founded by Sandra Cisneros. Macondo is a conference for Latinx and multicultural writers across the country. Although I have been writing for many years, I was late in arriving to Macondo, but there I found a community of writers who felt like family. That year I worked with Reyna Grande, whom I was acquainted with through writing circles in the Bay Area. It was a summer of new friendships and finding sustenance in my writing. I felt a renaissance of Latinx creativity flowing through San Antonio, a city I had written about as I chronicled the lives of conjunto musicians and guitarists such as Lydia Mendoza, back when I worked for the record label. In the five days I spent in San Antonio, I marveled at how talented and magical my raza, my Chicano compatriots, were who thrived in that community. I loved seeing brown faces and families everywhere I went in restaurants, grocery stores and on the river walk. Our readings and workshop talks fueled me in a way I had not experienced in many years. My poet friends, Natalia Treviño, Viktoria Valenzuela and Vincent Cooper also hosted and accompanied me for a reading of Café Colima at the Twig bookstore. San Antonio became a highlight as well, in my triptych of the Southwest. For the first time in my life, I feel a sense of place not only in the San Francisco Bay Area, but also within the Southwest. I know these trips have aligned for a reason, to more deeply connect me with my homeland. I may one day make use of that stack of documents to allow my passage and integration into another country; James Baldwin, Josephine Baker, Gertrude Stein and the Cuban writer, Zoé Valdés all come to mind as each of these artists made France their home. Could leaving the U.S. help me focus on my home in a way I can’t when I am mired in the struggle of surviving the daily grind? The truth is, I still would have to earn my living and be an immigrant all over again. Even though I am U.S. born, let’s face it, my brownness and indigenous features have always marked me as other. For now, I am staying in California, through the pandemic, through fire season, through climate catastrophes, through my children’s youth and resisting these times of racial strife. After all, if the artists and resistors leave, who will be left to continue the work and fight the good fight? It’s easy to favor an escape to another idyllic country, but I am not ready to abandon the life I have created here, the life my father and grandfather died for.
Leticia Del Toro is a fiction writer, poet and essayist from Crockett, California. Her awards include the 2017 Kore Press Fiction Prize for the chapbook Café Colima as well as residencies and fellowships from Hedgebrook, the NY State Summer School of the Arts and Bread Loaf. Her writing has appeared in Huizache, Zyzzyva, Mutha Magazine, About Place Journal and is forthcoming in Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century. Leticia earned an M.A in English from the University of California at Davis and also attended VONA and Macondo. She is working on a collection of short stories.
My mother counts gạo to the sound of California storm. She keeps the bin full when sirens echo. Like today. And tomorrow. And the tomorrow when there isn’t one.
I have never felt more like a refugee’s child than I do clutching a plate full with reserve, every bite, the same prayer to different gods.
Even in apocalypse, my mother cooks with the same refugee kitchen rules: the more bruised the heart, the more fragrant the fish sauce.
Sing the broth to boil faster. When the rain arrives, open the door for heartbeats traveling on trails of smoldering sandalwood.
Serve every permutation of spices ground down to the memory of harvest day. Always keep an extra serving simmering.
Đỗ Nguyên Mai is a Vietnamese poet from Santa Clarita, California. They are the author of Ghosts Still Walking (Platypus Press, 2016) and Battlefield Blooming (Sahtu Press, 2019). They have work forthcoming in They Rise Live a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets (Blue Oak Press, 2020) and Read Ritual: An Anthology (Locked Horn Press, 2020). Mai is the 2019 Locked Horn Press Publication Prize winner and a 2019 Sophie Kerr Prize finalist, in addition to a having received funding from the AAPI Civic Engagement Fund for their literary work.
爱： (Ài / love) celebrates the roof of the mouth and ”eye” halves the poet halves the name given by 爸爸： (Bàba / father): bisector / point of blame: one-side source material for a poem about language loss and so will not be mentioned here.
西： (Xī / west) at five years old compasses left: the departure of word as name like arrival of 第： (Dìdi / younger brother): names me (Jiějiě / older sister) with sibling spite though in the late hours I sit on the bed holding his head like a globe. 一： (Yī / One) school one alphabet to rule all alphabets against language without alphabet against 发： (Fā / hair) static-charged on its brush: the loosener of things, as Fā diverts to “far”– I am, I swear,
吉： (Jí / auspicious): “conductive to success”: filament glow not cowprod discharge, see! I am 很好： (Hěn hǎo / ”very good”) the teachers say the father says the mother does not say “Tian- 爱： Ài, let’s speak Cantonese for a minute.” Now Dìdi says “Tian-Ai” not 姐姐： Jiějiě “because I’m not a baby anymore.” And I’m a baby with no globe anymore, now in the late hours on the bed 开： (Kāi / open)ing the writing hand, mouth in muscle fibers praying quietly: 留 ： (Liú / stay) please, I 没有： (Méiyǒu / don’t have) you 内： (Nèi / inside) anymore.” 哦哦： “(Oo / oh)?” they laugh, 放屁: “(Fàng pì / bullshit).”
气： (Qìgōng / Breathing), 二： (Èr / two) lungs coded to exhale an impossible sound 是： (Shì / ”yes”), but like trebuchet only, 踢： (Tī / kick)ing counterweight: this poem,quickly, shoot too late temperate tympanic tadpole—
—but
I’m sorry
u: mom says v: no words start with these.
我： (Wǒ / I) said, it doesn’t matter, 谢谢： (Xièxiè / thank you), I 有： (Yǒu / have) some 字： (Zì / words) now.
Previously published in Pleiades: Literature in Context, Volume 40, Issue 2, Summer 2020
Some Time in Tailiang
昔者庄周梦为蝴蝶
Two hundred years ago the coast flooded a hundred miles inward, cities dissolved in Pacific: Tailiang swallowed kind enough to leave survivors
and our children still came, but with each flush something faded, in desperate nets fish slapped their tails extinguishing incense which refused to burn in new humidity, smoked fibers of our thousand-year poems that refused to regather from the sea back to our hands back to our mouths feeding back what we had forgotten.
栩栩然蝴蝶也, 自喻适志与，不知周也。
The consequence is now.
Buildings caterpillar to the sky flushed together, the thickest fog demanding nothing fed by exhalations demanding everything.
On high balconies grow lamps feed lychee trees, staining the fog razor purple;
looming tired tangles of concrete, scaffold and wire hanging from air conditioner boxes doing nothing for the condensated windows,
everything only a grey suggestion. No cars on the streets, not today. Only the hum of the boxes whirring fans coiling the fog disturbing
telephone wire spider legs above the street.
Neon signs float rectangular to a vanishing point, fog hands over their mouths muffling their beckoning to:
俄然觉，则戚戚然周也。
Mercy came once in an unearthed erhu, Cradled from a waterlogged basement like an infant. We did not know it was an erhu then but we wanted to so badly That we knew it without name.
Tatters of snakeskin framed its wood hexagon A cane clacked to the floor The elder scrambled up the eucalyptus Descending with a python Slit down the middle with his pinky nail.
Eight sons to stretch its skin across the box Eight more to seal it, The old man flicked his fingernail 二 Two notes that drummed the river Ricocheted across the city a million Pulses synced to silence Shrine to a new and fleeting God.
Once a boy stole it Strung it with bra wire and bowed: 胡 A soft wail traced spines top to bottom Vibrato smoothed down vertebra with its single finger Shivering the trees retracting their plums and the mothers Pulled for them finally finally—
A week later cityfolk found an instrument Snapped in half Swallowed whole by a boa;
A week later they found the boy Shot dead in the evening, Rosy under the traffic light.
不知周之梦为蝴蝶与，
No one admits we’ve started praying again so the procession is quiet. The fog has thickened, but lanterns border the streets, orbed hearts guiding the parade: the people in black
robes, bodiless if not for the drifting ceramic masks of tigers monkeys dragons cranes women, drumming out their prayer: summon summon
Men: frustrated, drool seawater as they sing Women: humming mouths sticky with lychee eyes,
stomachs full of unripe things.
Above the street I watch wet-mouthed at the window.
Grandfather smokes the long pipe on the couch, its long crescent channels drags in quarter notes, smoke wafts S’s out the window joining the fog–
One time this was a snake He says.
I lied. I don’t see him. He died years ago. I don’t see him so violently I see him.
蝴蝶之梦为周与？
The drums persist: communion communion Little girls’ heads above dart in and out of windows, salivating for red.
My brother, mask of a crimson ox drumming away something dad put inside him.
He doesn’t tell me much about it, only that in the night dad stood over the bed
while he slept. It slipped from the mouth and buried into his.
I asked him what it tasted like. He said a dog’s tongue, loving too hard.
Tian-Ai (天爱) is a diasporic poet, musician, and visual artist from Seattle. She is a fellow of the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets. She appears in Asterism literary journal, with work forthcoming in Flock Magazine, Pleiades, and others. More of her work can be found at tian-ai.com.
Alina (Ali) Viknyanskiy is a cartoonist and writer who works with traditional media to tell stories through comics. Her writing consists of short memoirs and observations and her pieces are created with heart and shameless freedom. She graduated with Graphic Design and Illustration degrees from Missouri State University in 2018 and is currently based in Springfield, MO. Ali’s work has been featured in Driftwood Press, Issue 6.2, and in Aquifer: The Florida Review Online. The best way to keep up with Ali and her work is through her Instagram page @hey.grandma.
An artist-poet goes to a party in Hout Bay in Cape Town. The hosts are a white photojournalist and his wife. On the wall in the kitchen is a photograph of the journalist in Rwanda holding a black baby. The poet is struck by the expression on the man’s face. On closer inspection she realises that the infant he holds is dead – there is a bullet hole in the middle of the baby’s forehead. The journalist tells them how, when he returned from Rwanda, he had the smell of death in his nose. His wife nods as he speaks. He tries to get the smell out of his nose every morning; he rinses his nostrils out with soap, uses sprays, plunges his nose deep into bouquets of agapanthus. One day his wife tells him the smell is inside his head and he needs to see a doctor. Everyone nods sympathetically.
Milk-white skin dished on perlemoen sushi SQ in top clubs don’t-ask-pay-later
pink tuna crabsticks sashimi eat me fat black fingers pluck salmon from nipples
liquid libations BEE2Tables have turned they say Fear of a black planet they laugh
Trump understands better than Obama Bombay Sapphire rinses raw fish
gold toothpicks flick spittle on white girls Black capitalism don’t bend at the knee
for who Jay Z? What hero takes rain-check kill their own talent?Good-looking fool in an afro
We done with slavery, apartheid runs deep. Equality? Pipe dream. Folk need system and queues
Poor people rather fuck than work Why those make money run to the shacks always?
Who laughs the longest stays richer wink at white-girl plate swallow seaweed snacks
Baby it’s our turn now they say Gi‘em a taste of their own medicine
wear township trials as prestige badge high-price mouthfuls the freedom spoils
1. on a South African restaurant menuS.Q. refers to Salon Qualitaire or quality determined by the establishment. A more direct translation is ‘subject to quotation’ due to the practice of weighing certain foods such as shellfish
2. BEE refers to Black Economic Empowerment
Amanda Holiday is a UK-based artist and poet. Her chapbook The Art Poems was published in 2018 by Akashic Books as part of New Generation African Poets. Her text “A Posthumous conversation about Black Art” was published in 2019 in the 1st edition of UK visual culture journal Critical Fish. In 2019, she completed the MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at UEA with Distinction. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, South Bank Poetry, and Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal (UK). In 2020, she reached the final shortlist for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize and established the UK’s first crowdfunded poetry press Black Sunflowers. She live in South London with her teenage daughter.
“A whiff of something” and “Sushi SQ” previously appeared in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal.
I. MacArthur was not supposed to be where your line ended – Nia’s gone
You were to return home, ride ricketing rails deep East, transfer your long way Home – A liquified, river of blood
Graduate with honors, make beats bend corners hold hands, be eighteen – In supernova brightness
You swallowed ancestral fear to step onto that platform, Cleft carotid rests under tarp your sisters kept closeby –
A scream like that ceaseless, sparking grate will spear a humid night – 9-car Dublin/Pleasanton in 2 minutes
And where do you journey now? And what sense do we make of this? Where will your mother’s body breathe? She illuminates the tunnels
II. In the morning, when Her train comes, my Nails punch lunes into my palms. In the morning, Black women gather beneath unseen umbrellas – scatter plots along gray platform – lined against the walls. In the morning, Black women downcast. Avert their gazes from oblivion, necks weighted with recall. I boomerang a rage white. Slice a crescent sharp enough to sever. Tongues that utter this: senseless. Senseless.
Senseless. when children become ancestors.
III. & Mama – I promise I’m safe on trains here. & Mama – I can hear you cry-singing for me. & Mama – You gonna find your way back to breathing. & Mama – There’s so many colors here. Mama – Colors I don’t even have proper names for. & Mama – We got them dancers out here, too! & Mama – Everyone, everything is conductor. & Mama – Our trains don’t have tracks, just kinda glide like water. & Mama – It’s warm here, warm like light. & Mama – I’m alright, mama. I’m more than alright.
MJ is a poet & parent living in Oakland, CA. Their work is featured or forthcoming at Kissing Dynamite, Rigorous Mag, & Borderlands Texas Poetry Review. They are an Assistant Poetry Editor at Foglifter Press. MJ has received fellowships from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, SF Writers Grotto, VONA, & Kearny Street Workshop. They are currently the Community Engagement Graduate Fellow in the MFA program at Mills College.
Hibiscus, slim in hand, smoking what ought be spoken. Trite tripe transcending bitterness into tribalist peacekeeping. Boorish convulsion inserting pleonastic adieu to quidnunc’s deathbed. Transversal transparency performing pas de bourree for audience of boors.
Assommant
Nesting song on a balcony of sun distilling the partiality of the I into the sonority of clarity. Absentminded softness instinctually awakening ball gowns and verdure on rail of elements. Thinly veiled imbalance freeing primordial flight through a looking smile of retenue.
With
Taut onde dramatizing urgency towards an inelegant incandescence /wood in lubricated machine of cultural insignificance and filial splendor. Seared gradient districts justifying intrinsic values of divisible accord/ consensus for mea culpa of none and suppression of all sense-acute partiality. Sheet of race marching in one kindness/spear the reversal of millenia of conflation from/of/at board of social constructors. Dashing sore of ominous baseness barking a purr at the balance of a glorious high noon firmament.
Stephanie Jean is the winner of the BOMB Poetry Contest 2020 Judged by Simone White and a Cave Canem Fellow. Her poems have appeared in [PANK] and The Southampton Review.
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